Psycholinguistic models of language processing usually
postulate that parsing the syntactic structure of a sen-
tence proceeds incrementally in s o m e way, which means
that the syntactic analysis is not delayed until the end of
the clause or sentence. In this paper w e will discuss dif-
ferent conceptions of incrementality in the light of em-
pirical studies on the influence of grammatical case on
structure building in German subject-object asymme-
tries. It will be shown that neither word-by-word attach-
ment of partial structures into the phrase marker of the
sentence (Frazier, 1987a), nor head comer parsing (Ab-
ney, 1987; Kay, 1989) can explain the data found in our
experiments. A s a strategy which is consistent with our
data, left-comer parsing (Johnson-Laird, 1983) will be
discussed.